Ramblings by Chase

So Colin and I started playing around with a train set that he brought back with him after Christmas. By the time that I got involved he already had a basic layout going with DC locomotives and even a tunnel. Pretty cool stuff all around. That is until he found pictures of people building spirals on the Internet.

So, we began thinking about how to pull off a cool spiral, how high to make it, what grade we could actually use (the angle of the track), etc. Before the night was up we had all sorts of grandiose plans … many of which we knew were completely unrealistic. But what good are plans if they aren’t grand? Long story short (and I do mean long), we came up with a plan to use rectangles cut out of plywood, stacked end to end, in a circle slowly climbing skyward (the thickness of the plywood gave us just about the right grade). Once done it was to stand just over three feet tall. (picture)

Construction started out really slow as we were not real sure how we wanted to do certain things, but we did know that we wanted it built in two halves so that it could fit through the doorway. By the time we got to the second half we were flying through it. It took us a few weeks to get it all together, then our attention shifted to the rest of the layout. We had three feet of vertical space to use if we wanted (what good is a spiral if it doesn’t go anywhere?), so we settled on two additional levels. Level 1 (the main level) is 4′X8′, level 2 is roughly 4′X3′, and level 3 is roughly 3′X3′. Levels two and three are accessible only via the spiral and they will only have a single loop, but there will be plenty of space for us to build small buildings and industry on the layout.

Not only were we interested in the layout itself, but we were also really interested in controlling the trains as much as possible. Neither of us had ever dealt with any model trains other than the standard DC locomotives, so all of our planning was based around them. We, again, had grand plans for an elaborate control system so that more than one train could be run on the layout at once. Colin was doing a little research online towards that goal when he stumbled across a control system for model trains called DCC. It already implemented far more than we could ever have hoped to do ourselves, and in a much more elegant manner.

Unfortunately, the DCC system is really only designed to handle the locomotives (there are accessory decoders, but who wants to pay that much for stupid accessories like switches) so we again had to do some designing. This time, however, we called in some support. I asked Chuck Cox if he would be willing to take a look at what we had and offer suggestions. Man, that was the right idea! Chuck got us moving in what I believe will be a great direction. When we progress a little more on this, I’ll let you know how it’s going (there will be plenty of documentation eventually).

Until later, go read something else.